Bright Lights
by thorscoreandseven
Summary: And he can feel himself falling. He can feel himself surviving her.


**Author's Note: A rather surreal and abstract (read: heartbreakingly average) attempt at a first fic. The characters in this all belong to the wonderful JK Rowling. Enjoy!**

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**Bright Lights.**

_"And we are emblazoned_  
_As bright lights we'll thrive"  
_-Emily and the Woods

_And he can feel himself falling. He can feel himself surviving her._

Today, he can smell the earth. He can smell it most days, but not like this. It's never been like this. He can feel it inside him. It's up his nose, inside his senses, clouding his receptors with its rich, dark scent, billowing up like smoke plumes in his nasal passageways.  
It came out when you broke the first layer. The ground at top, it was stiff, hardened by the growth of the now-dead grass and matted with blood, but once you broke past, the smell seeped out. And it was the most welcome feeling for miles round. He can almost taste it in his mouth; it's so strong, the feel of the dirt and the mud, crumb upon crumb, never-ending, oblivious to the corpses to which it was playing host.

She was silent as they dug. She was silent with most people, and it wasn't like he's ever been her favourite person to talk to. She was silent with such _purpose._ Her silence was the kind that dug graves and broke hearts. It went on for miles. It made a point to hurt him, because he could feel himself tiring of it, hating it.  
Though she wasn't silent, really. He could hear her soft pants above the sound of his spade cutting into the earth, her intake of breath as she swung the spade over her shoulder. But she was silent to him. The ground was all he could hear. He'd stopped listening a long time ago, but cracks of sounds slipped in sometimes, separate, jumpy, disjointed, and it bothered him so much that he just opened up his ears again. And you know how, if you listen for long enough, your ears start making up the sounds. He can hear lion roars and the sea and he can hear the light. He doesn't know how, but he does. He feels the ground, churning it all out. And now the more he hears, the more he wants to drop the bloody spade and lie down in it, to cover himself in it and to never come back up again. But he can't, he knows. Because of the pity he felt for the bodies slouched nearby, the gratitude for not being one of them and the wish that he had been.

"Malfoy."  
It's not till a minute later that it hits him.  
"Malfoy."

He flinches. Somewhere, inside him, he'd hoped he'd imagined it, that he'd heard it in his head somewhere with the lions and the sea and the light.  
He can feel her breath, see it mingling with his.  
He knows what she wants, of course. She wants what he wants, and what Potter wants, even though the bastard's spent the whole night looking out onto the lake, she wants what they haven't had in days, she wants it so badly, he can see it in her eyes. He can see them begging, but they don't know who to beg to.  
"It's been six days," she says, "and the only sleep we've got is the number times we've blinked."  
Sleep. Sweet, thick, dreamless, sleep.  
He shrugs, because he doesn't know the hell else to react. "I know."  
There had been something safe about the silence. And now she's broken it, he feels awkward. He feels wronged. He feels like he's come out of a cave and he's blinking in the sun.

She looks at him, just for a second. And he looks right back at her, caught by surprise, too scared to move. And he sees the colour of her eyes, how the right one's slightly lighter and her neck's covered in dirt and how he face is shining, moist with sweat. He wants to reach down. He wants to reach down and wipe it away.  
She hops down, delicately, into the grave he's just dug.  
"What are you doing?" he asks, even though he knows exactly what it is. He's been thinking about it for days. But he's never got up the guts to try. He's scared of what it might mean.  
She shrugs. "Nothing." She kicks up the dirt. "It's pretty wide," she says. "It'll fit two pretty easily."  
He wants to tell himself that she's talking about the corpses a few metres away, but he knows she's not. He knows it's for him, and for her.

She looks up again, and he's sure, for the first time in weeks, he's seeing something as close to a smile there is.  
He doesn't say a thing, but the affirmation's there. He's not sure how he's told her, but he has. Maybe she just knows. Maybe it's a trick of the light. He's always found it funny, that. How their whole relationship has been based around things they knew about each other, but never said. They'd never had to.  
"It's weird though, isn't it?" He sits down and swings his legs over the side. "Think about it. It's a _grave, _Granger. And even though I feel I've died too, it's not meant for us."  
"Think of it as a temporary measure. It's not like things can get much worse."  
"What makes you think it will work?"

"Nothing."

She says it like it doesn't matter. She says it like trying to get to sleep in a grave is a normal thing to do. She says it like it doesn't bother her in the slightest, but he knows it does, really. She was just too desperate to show it.  
"I bet you've tried everything, Granger. I bet you've tried every sleeping spell, even the dangerous ones. I bet you've had those pills, or whatever those muggle things are. Nothing works, does it? And you want to put your faith in a grave? A fucking grave? If you want to get to sleep, go kill yourself. I'll just dig another one of these. And I'll keep you in this one, Granger, just for memories sake, and shoot myself so I can crash down next to you."

He'd wanted it to hurt her. He'd wanted it to make impact, or to pierce some through any part of her shell, but he's gotten nowhere. He can see it in her eyes as she looks at him now, and the light. The light tells him things.  
She just shrugs, again. "Better me than you, Malfoy. I'll warn you now not to die before me."  
"Why?"  
She sighs. She looks tired all of a sudden. Funny, he thinks. Weeks of fighting and digging graves and watching people drop dead like flies, and this makes her tired. "I've buried too many people, I guess. Thought I might give someone else the pleasure."

"_He's_ alive, though. Potter."  
She shakes her head. "Those bodies over there are more alive than he'll ever be again. But," she cracks her knuckles. "He'll make it till eighty, I guess. He'll find some girl, have a few kids, and make money, but he'll never know why."  
"Why what?"  
She shrugs. "Just why."  
He nods, but he doesn't understand a thing, of course. He never had, with her. It was like that time that muggle science lessons had been compulsory and she'd put her hand up, and she'd explained atomic structure, just like that. And he remembers not understanding, but he remembers wanting to.

It's another few minutes, when she speaks.

"You going to come down, Malfoy? 'Cos I'm not sleeping here alone."

He doesn't move.

She waits. And it's a while, but he jumps down, and runs a hand through his hair. The soil comes off on his fingers.  
"It's not going to work, you know."  
"They always say that about everything."  
"Is this how you want to die? Because we might, you know. It'll be something symbolic, I bet. He'll appear out of nowhere, kill us, and call it art, because this is so fucking romantic."  
"He?"  
"Him. The big man. Death."  
"I don't see how it matters. But I've never thought about it."  
"I wanted to make an impact. Fall off a cliff, or get murdered. That would be even better."  
"You think it'll make people care more?"  
"I don't give a damn about people. It's just for me."  
It takes just a second, but suddenly she's up close, her breath against his face. It scares him how warm she feels, how present, how _alive._ He wants to keep her there, frozen in time, lock her away, just as she was now."You died, just like we all did. Every last one of us."

He takes her hand, then. He knows his hands are bruised and calloused, unlike they used to be. Those traditional rich boy with features, that could cut glass and hands which could rock you to sleep. But it'll have to do. He's scared there's someone watching, but he's always had a tendency to have to most irrational fears, so he tells himself to suck it up, and do it anyway.  
"You're scared," she says. And she's hit the nail right on the head. She has a tendency of doing that, he's noticed. But it's scared him, because she's right. He's never been more scared in his life.  
"Yes," he says simply. "Yes, I am."

There's everything that could happen and then there's her. She's already happened. And he supposes he's scared because he doesn't know what this means, what it _will_ mean, he doesn't know _why, _as she puts it_. _He's scared that it might become soiled with implications. He wants to go back to the time when holding hands meant nothing more than holding hands, and when he could just lie down with her without people talking. And he's scared that if he does die, he won't know which way to go, to the light or away from it. He's scared of all the possibilities.

But there are no people, he tells himself, apart from Potter; but he'll spend the rest of the day looking into the lake and convincing himself he sees things, convincing himself they matter.

"This doesn't mean a thing, you know," as the he lowers himself to lie down. "It doesn't mean a single thing. It never will."  
"I know," she says softly.  
She lies down next to him. He can feel the dirt pressing up against his ears, in his nose, and he can taste it, thick and spicy and sweet. And he just lies there with her, stiff, unmoving, like lovers, fingers raking up crumbs of soil and dirt. It strikes him how little he knows about her, apart from the obvious.  
"You're cut," he can feel himself saying. "Near your ear, Granger, you're cut."  
She doesn't even bother answering. He doesn't know why, whether it's because the sleeps taken over her faster than him, or if his statement's just too stupid to answer to. Maybe she knows already. Maybe she's trying to forget.  
And watching the blood, her blood, drip down onto the dirt, mix with the soil like it's its family, its kin, it hurts him. Because that was she was to him, before now. That was all she had been. Mud and blood. Two words carelessly shoved together and left to rot in the corner until someone found them and decided they sounded nice together. And he's scared he can't see past that.  
He can hear the sea, and the lion roars and the light, even louder than before.

"Walk away from the light," he can hear her tell him, as the sleep drowns it all out. "You won't get anywhere of course, but I guess we've spent too long doing what's not expected of us to start following the rules now."

And he wakes up; he can see her clearly, in a room with dark walls and nothing but a tub of hand cream.

"You came," he says, as she approaches him. He doesn't know where she's coming from, and he doesn't know where they are, but that doesn't matter.  
She smiles at him. It's like somebody's painted it on, it's so perfect. "It's going to come soon, you know. Light being the fastest thing in the world doesn't really give it too many disadvantages."  
"I bought moisturiser."  
She smiles even wider.  
"What even _is _moisturiser?"  
She laughs. It echoes around the walls and it fills him with a kind of joy he's never felt before.  
"Makes your skin softer."  
"This better be good."  
He threads his fingers through hers, and waits.

He wakes up to the sea, lions roaring, and the sound of light. And when he opens his eyes, he sees it too.

"Hermione," he tries to say, but the word comes out slurred. His fingers are stuck in her hair, and they're burning.  
It's around them in a sort of duvet of brightness. And he wants to get up and run away from it, just like she'd told him to, but he can't move. He can't move a thing.  
It shines through every gap, in her hair, through her fingers. It makes her glow.

"Hermione," he tries again.

And he can feel himself falling. He can feel himself surviving her.

Then the light takes him whole. It takes her too.

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**I really hope you liked it! ****Quote at the beginning from a fantastic song: Steal his Heart -Emily and the Woods. ****Put whatever you thought down in a review - any feedback at all would be greatly appreciated.**


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